Many Kiev supermarkets have introduced limits on the amount of food products that can be purchased by a single individual.

As products from the so-called “social group” have grown more expensive over the last several weeks, the retailers are introducing limits on purchases.

The limits have already been adopted by several supermarkets.

A single individual can make a one-time purchase of:

--2 bottles of sunflower seed oil

--2 packages of buckwheat

--3-5 kg of flour (depending on the store)

--3-5 kg of sugar (depending on the store)

Many chain stores have posted announcements concerning the limitations.

There are no limits on bread, potatoes, milk or meat products. At the same time, the variety of products from these categories has considerably narrowed recently.

Ukraine is also experiencing a rapid growth of food and gasoline prices. Price monitoring has noted an increase of vegetable prices by 13-18%, bread and pasta products by 3-5%, sugar by 2-%, and fuel by 18%.

J.Hawk's Comment: This kind of thing deserves close scrutiny. Food prices and, especially, food shortages are the one factor that is guaranteed to bring out millions into the streets against a government. We'll soon see whether it's a temporary problem induced by the spike in the hryvnya and the resulting panic buying, or a harbinger of worse problems to come.

From the political perspective, this is the reason (not a reason, but THE reason) I believe Kiev will not resume fighting any time soon. IMF credits are now a matter of life and death for Kiev, and IMF does not like to credit countries who undermine their own creditworthiness by waging civil wars.

February 17, 2015

All the gimmicks lenders press on borrowers to maintain the artifice that the loan is being serviced are financial frauds.

Sometimes the best way to summarize a complex situation is with an analogy. The Greek debt crisis, for example, is very much like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-08.

As you might recall, service workers earning $25,000 annually got $500,000 mortgages to buy McMansions in subprime’s go-go days. The applicant fudged a bit here and there on income and creditworthiness, and lenders reaping huge profits from originating and selling mortgages were delighted to ignore prudent underwriting standards and stamp “low-risk” on the mortgage because it was quickly sold to credulous investors.

The bank made its money in transaction and origination fees, and passed the risk of default on to investors who accepted the fraud that the loan was low-risk.

The loan was fundamentally imprudent and risky because the borrower was not qualified for a loan of such magnitude. But since the risk was distributed to others, the banks ignored the 100% probability of eventual default and skimmed the profits upfront.

February 16, 2015

“…PERIES: So, Michael, in a recent interview published in The National Interest magazine, you said that most media covers Russia as if it is the greatest threat to Ukraine. History suggests the IMF may be far more dangerous. What did you mean by that?

HUDSON: First of all, the terms on which the IMF make loans require more austerity and a withdrawal of all the public subsidies. The Ukrainian population already is economically devastated. The conditions that the IMF’s program is laying down for making loans to Ukraine is that it must repay the debts. But it doesn’t have the ability to pay. So there’s only one way to do it, and that’s the way that the IMF has told Greece and other countries to do: It has to begin selling off whatever the nation has left of its public domain; or, to have your leading oligarchs take on partnerships with American or European investors, so that they can buy out into the monopolies in the Ukraine and indulge in rent-extraction.

This is the IMF’s one-two punch. Punch number one is: here’s the loan – to pay your bondholders, so that you now owe us, the IMF, to whom you can’t write down debts. The terms of this loan is to believe our Guiding Fiction: that you can pay foreign debt by running a domestic budgetary surplus, by cutting back public spending and causing an even deeper depression.

This idea that foreign debts can be paid by squeezing out domestic tax revenues was controverted by Keynes in the 1920s in his discussion of German reparations. (I devote a chapter to reviewing the controversy in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt.) There is no excuse for making this error – except that the error is deliberate, and is intended to lead to failure, so that the IMF can then say that to everyone’s surprise and nobody’s blame, their “stabilization program” destabilized rather than stabilized the economy….”

February 03, 2015

Caught Red-Handed

by MIKE WHITNEY

“In the latest debacle for the US State Department and the Obama Administration, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape micro-managing Ukraine opposition party strategies with US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. That the Ukraine regime-change operation is to some degree being directed from Washington can no longer be denied….The taped conversation demonstrates in clear detail that while Secretary of State John Kerry decries any foreign meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs, his State Department is virtually managing the entire process.”

Washington is at it again, up to its old tricks. You’d think that after the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos someone on the policymaking team would tell the fantasists to dial-it-down a bit. But, no. The Obama claque is just as eager to try their hand at regime change as their predecessors, the Bushies. This time the bullseye is on Ukraine, the home of the failed Orange Revolution, where US NGOs fomented a populist coup that brought down the government and paved the way for years of social instability, economic hardship and, eventually, a stronger alliance with Moscow.

That sure worked out well, didn’t it? One can only wonder what Obama has in mind for an encore.

January 12, 2015

The United States has supported the changes in Ukraine over the last year, including the new government and its military attacks on its south eastern provinces. The following video and article support an alternative view of these events.

New York Times Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine

During my years at Newsweek in the late 1980s, when I would propose correcting some misguided conventional wisdom, I’d often be told, “let’s leave that one for the historians,” with the magazine not wanting to challenge an erroneous storyline that all the important people “knew” to be true. And if false narratives only affected the past, one might argue my editors had a point. There’s always a lot of current news to cover.

But most false narratives are not really about the past; they are about how the public perceives the present and addresses the future. And it should fall to journalists to do their best to explain this background information even if it embarrasses powerful people and institutions, including the news organizations themselves.

Yet, rather than take on that difficult task, most major news outlets prefer to embroider onto their existing tapestry of misinformation, fitting today’s reporting onto the misshapen fabric of yesterday’s. They rarely start from scratch and admit the earlier work was wrong.

So, how does the mainstream U.S. news media explain the Ukraine crisis after essentially falsifying the historical record for the past year? Well, if you’re the New York Times, you keep on spinning the old storyline, albeit with a few adjustments.

For instance, on Sunday, the Times published a lengthy article that sought to sustain the West’s insistence that the coup overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych wasn’t really a coup – just the crumbling of his government in the face of paramilitary violence from the street with rumors of worse violence to come – though that may sound to you pretty much like a coup. Still, the Times does make some modifications to Yanukovych’s image.

In the article, Yanukovych is recast from a brutal autocrat willfully having his police slaughter peaceful protesters into a frightened loser whose hand was “shaking” as he signed a Feb. 21 agreement with European diplomats, agreeing to reduce his powers and hold early elections, a deal that was cast aside on Feb. 22 when armed neo-Nazi militias overran presidential and parliamentary offices.

November 05, 2014

There’s a story here, not well reported, about how both the United States and Russia have, apparently, been supporting political opposition movements in each other’s “spheres of influence.”.

So here is U.S. Ambassador Nuland’s discussion of her government’s interference in the Ukraine, in supporting it becoming more tied to Europe, as opposed to Russia, with the help of $5 billion dollars over the last 20 years.

In addition, here is a discussion of the whys and how-could-it-be’s of support for such a Ukrainian opposition,

Brzezinski Mapped Out the Battle for Ukraine in 1997

It's all about maintaining the US position as the world's sole superpower

Strangely, I think, here’s a discussion in the journal Foreign Affairs of the claim that Russia has been meddling in the politics of Europe by supporting, of all people, the far right,

Putin's Western Allies

Why Europe's Far Right Is on the Kremlin's Side

Given that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated reasons for invading Crimea was to prevent “Nazis” from coming to power in Ukraine, it is perhaps surprising that his regime is growing closer by the month to extreme right-wing parties across Europe. But, in both cases, Putin’s motives are not primarily ideological. In Ukraine, he simply wants to grab territory that he believes rightly belongs to him. In the European Union, he hopes that his backing of fringe parties will destabilize his foes and install in Brussels politicians who will be focused on dismantling the EU rather than enlarging it.

“…With the Authorization of Federal Authorities, FAA complied with the request to ban media helicopters from covering police conduct during the protest, but does it really matter asks Glen Ford, Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report….”

“…Now joining us to talk about all of this is our regular commentator Glen Ford. Glen, as you know, is joining us from Plainfield, New Jersey. He is the editor of the Black Agenda Report.

FORD: Well, as you said, we learned that the police were able to institute a no-fly zone over the no-justice zone with the collaboration of federal authorities. One of the restrictions was that planes or helicopters--that's what they were really afraid of, news helicopters--couldn't go any lower than 3,000 feet. That's about three times the height of the Empire State building. You can't see much in terms of police misbehavior from that kind of height.

But does it really matter, since even if you catch police on video killing innocent civilians, it's not likely in the United States that they're going to be punished or even fired? We see rumors now reported by msnbc that Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown, is going to be "eased out"--that's the quote--"eased out" of the Ferguson Police Department--not fired, but eased out somehow. We also see those same sources claiming that the police chief in Ferguson, Thomas Jackson, is going to resign, but Jackson denies that.

The main expectation in St. Louis and around the country is about the grand jury and what it's going to do in terms of Michael Brown's killing. The betting is on. Las Vegas would like you to bet as much as you'd like that there will be an indictment, and you'd be almost certain to lose, because cops are almost never indicted in the killing of unarmed blacks in the United States. We don't have really good data on how often this occurs, but from what data the FBI does gather, we do know that about half of all the young men--that is, 20 years old and younger--half the young men who are killed by police are black. And from that we can conclude that the federal government's failure to even gather data on how often cops kill black people should be viewed, we should look at it as part of a national conspiracy on a vast scale. It is quite clear that the entire national criminal justice system conspires to confer immunity on police who kill black people. So they don't really have to go through all these antics about declaring no-fly zones. They operate in no-justice and immunity zones.

Naturally, then, blacks rebel. And it is just and understandable that folks would rebel against a system that conspires to methodically, institutionally deny them not just their rights, but life. And, in fact, black people have rebelled against this police system of murder ever since the Harlem riots of 1935.

But even setting aside the problems with the judicial system, which does not operate in terms of police killing of blacks, we can't even get a killer cop fired. And we contrast this with another category of civil servant, teachers. It is fashionable now all the way up to the White House to call for lopping off the heads of teachers. And in California, a judge has even ruled that giving teachers tenure so that they can't be so easily fired violates the rights of poor children. But cops can kill black children and it's almost impossible to fire them. And if you're a cop in Ferguson, you can wear an arm band expressing solidarity with your fellow killer cop and nothing happens to you.

So I think we can conclude that in this sick society, in America, teachers would do a service for themselves, for their profession, they would get more respect, and certainly more job security, if they agreed to act as police and carry guns in the classroom, and especially they would get more respect and job security if they regularly used those guns against their students….”

The Ferguson No-Fly Zone was a Censorship Ploy

by THOMAS L. KNAPP

For nearly two weeks in August, the US Federal Aviation Administration imposed a “no-fly zone” over the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, where protests raged over the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The stated reason for the “no-fly zone” was that shots had been fired at a police helicopter.

Now, thanks to an Associated Press investigation, we learn that the real purpose of the airspace exclusion was to hamper media coverage of the protests. Commercial and law enforcement traffic flew unhindered over Ferguson, which lies across major flight paths into and out of Lambert-St.Louis International airport, a major hub. The helicopter shooting incident likely never happened: Per the AP account, “police officials confirmed there was no damage to their helicopter and were unable to provide an incident report on the shooting” and an FAA official described the incident as an unconfirmed rumor….

October 12, 2014

The following stories are about ways in which the CDC has made false assumptions about Ebola, the infection becoming widespread in Africa and threatening , as yet, a few places in the United States. But, beyond making false assumptions about Ebola as a disease, we are disserved by the CDC because it has misrepresented the science involving Ebola as being of one mind. The CDC would have us believe there is only its own understanding of Ebola, and anyone who would disagree would have so backing for their view. So, The CDC would have us believe that it would be difficult to get Ebola if one was just standing or sitting next to an Ebola-infected person. Yet, it has been suggested that Ebola virus can exist within the sputum coughed into the air in droplet form, and that if this material should get in contact with people the disease can thereby spread. This method of transmission is common. It does not seem implausible for a virus to so spread. It is a misrepresentation of the science to suggest, as the CDC has been doing, that there is no controversy amongst the scientific community about how to understand Ebola, and what to do about it. Given that there are disagreements, as I will show in the following arguments, the prudent position for the CDC and the American people is to err, if at all, on the side of caution. The CDC has seemed to only recommend less than the most cautious strategies against the disease. In doing this it seems to me, and the writers represented below, that the CDC is doing us a disservice. It actually might be causing people harm.

I want to present these arguments as a way to discuss the problem of Ebola, and infections in general, in order to show that Americans are like “Ma Barker,” and in denial, not just because the boys rob banks when they leave the house, but because the world is an unpleasant place in many other ways , too. “Ma,” unfortunately, can’t handle any of it.

The problem with the war in Viet Nam, etc., or the epidemic in Africa, is that Americans are most accurately described as being like the Barker gang. Ma Barker stayed at home while her boys went out to rob banks. They refuse to deal with reality. Ma, representing the people left at home, were in denial about what the boys did when they left the house. In order for us as political and philosophical activists to do something about the wars, or the health catastrophes, one not only has to do something about what the boys are doing when they leave the house, that is, get them to stop robbing banks, but, also, one has to get Americans to do something about the boys, and not just actively ignore or enable their criminality. This makes political or philosophical activism difficult. Not only do you have to stop the robberies, but you have to somehow get the people who have the power to stop them to actively do that when it seems to these Americans that their existence depends on not doing so. It’s the boys and their bank robberies, after all, who bring home the bacon and pay for all the other “nice” things around the house.

…Here are the five dangerous -- even deadly -- assumptions still being made by the CDC, an agency that is clearly behaving in a way that threatens the health and safety of the American people:

Assumption #1) Ebola only spreads via "direct contact"

The CDC continues to dangerously assert that Ebola only spread through "direct contact." This false claim openly encourages health and government officials to avoid donning necessary isolation gear (such as full face respirators) when mingling near infected Ebola patients. It also makes the idea of touching Ebola-contaminated surfaces (such as doorknobs, bed sheets, countertops and even vehicle door handles) seem perfectly safe. But virologists are now openly questioning this dangerous CDC assumption. As reported by the LA Times: [1] ...some also question the official assertion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air. In late 1989, virus researcher Charles L. Bailey supervised the government's response to an outbreak of Ebola among several dozen rhesus monkeys housed for research in Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington. What Bailey learned from the episode informs his suspicion that the current strain of Ebola afflicting humans might be spread through tiny liquid droplets propelled into the air by coughing or sneezing. "We know for a fact that the virus occurs in sputum and no one has ever done a study [disproving that] coughing or sneezing is a viable means of transmitting," he said. Unqualified assurances that Ebola is not spread through the air, Bailey said, are "misleading." Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, "some" infections may have occurred via "aerosol transmission."